ASIC wants open sesame on all phone, internet data

Bianca Hall and Lucy Battersby

THE Australian Securities and Investment Commission has called for phone call and internet data to be made available for its war on white-collar crime.

Not only does the authority want the powers to intercept the times, dates and details of telecommunications information, it also wants access to the contents of emails, social media chats and text messages.

The Internet Society of Australia's president, Narelle Clark, told the inquiry that metadata included more than the dates and times that people used the internet.

With access to the website a person had visited, she said, it was possible to see their login details and passwords, and information about where people had been on the web, for how long, and the contents of the web page visited.

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Telstra representatives revealed they could not retain any information about what its customers did on sites such as YouTube, video-conferencing service Skype, the auction site eBay or money transfer service PayPal.

''We cannot capture or provide any metadata or any content around something like Gmail because it is Google-owned, it is offshore and it is over the top of our network,'' Telstra's director of corporate security and investigations, Darren Kane, said. ''The real value of what we might have in a data retention scheme would be greatly diminished as soon as the organised criminals and potential terrorists knew that we were not capturing that data.''

Vodafone's David Moss said the company stored only customer billing data. This could include the times, dates and locations of calls made, and the locations of the person being called.

The internet provider iiNet said the discussion paper lacked detail about how much data needed to be kept.

It carries 1 million uniform resource locators per second, and would have to store all this data to comply with the proposed legislation,'' chief regulatory officer Steve Dalby said. This would cost iiNet about $3 million a month, and about $400 million across the industry to set up.

Tracking the ''destination of communication'' on the internet is much harder than on telephone networks where each destination has one number, he said.

''Destination of communication to a web site consists of hundreds of thousands of individual points. Because the way the internet operates, each item or object or device on the internet gets its own [unique] address.''